The Male Loneliness Epidemic Is Worse Than You Think

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]I got asked to give my take on the male loneliness epidemic. So I looked at the stats to see if there was one and um there is one and uh it's very sad looking at the stats. Very very sad. [snorts] And we know that overwhelmingly um men make up um most suicides.

[00:00:24]And I thought, God, that's that's awful.

[00:00:27]And then I looked and I was like, is there a general loneliness epidemic? And lo and behold, yes, there is a general loneliness epidemic. The WHO reckons that 100 people an hour die due to isolation related and loneliness related deaths.

[00:00:52]100 people an hour. Could you imagine being ignored to death?

[00:01:00]Could you imagine being ignored to death? The pain of that.

[00:01:05][sighs] And it made me very sad. And I I was thinking, well, what could be driving this loneliness epidemic? Why are people so lonely? And then when I thought about it more, I thought probably the right term for it is an atomization epidemic. So people become singular like an atom and they become cut off from family and from friends and from their community and from a sense of shared shared purpose really.

[00:01:40]And I thought, God, that's that's so sad that so many people are feeling so lonely.

[00:01:47]And I thought, no, I've experienced it, too. I've experienced it. I've experienced at times a crushing sense of loneliness.

[00:02:02]Men are reporting much fewer close friends now um than they were in 1990 than they had in 1990.

[00:02:10]And over half of men are saying they can't talk to their friends about any significant issues.

[00:02:19]And I think this is something that probably we should be actively looking at um overcoming ourselves. There was a controversial segment of a Steven Bartlett interview recently where he was talking about the male loneliness epidemic and he said he asked the question, should we put systems in place to combat this?

[00:02:44]And a lot of people got freaked out about that and I was a bit freaked out about it. And I think a lot of people were like, "Do you mean the government intervening and giving us a handmaid's tail style scenario?"

[00:02:57]Which is a very bad faith uh reaction.

[00:03:00]I've never met Steven. I don't I don't know what he meant when he said that.

[00:03:05]But I just want to say this.

[00:03:09]There's a couple of things. I worked in schools from 2003 to 2008. I worked in hundreds of schools with thousands of of students uh [clears throat] over that time and I was seeing a nent form of something that bothered me which I'd broadly call entitlement. Now don't switch off because there's a middle-aged man saying young people are entitled.

[00:03:39]I don't mean a person with a bad personality trait that's called entitlement. I mean a baseline of of entitlement that was being set. And this is culture's changed quite a bit since then. Technology usage has changed. Social media usage has changed a lot since then as well. But I was seeing the nent form of it. And I was seeing like a baseline of things should be good. Things should be good for me. And if they're not this good, something is wrong and someone should fix it. Now, [snorts] I want to make a point and please stay with me on this issue of entitlement. I don't think this is an individual trait issue. I think it's become a collective ideological expectation and I want to bring in some psychoanalytic theory at this point.

[00:04:32]If I Okay. When I'm a baby and I I'm hungry, I have a hunger, I have a need, I cry and mother comes and she feeds me from her breast. She's a good mother and I internalize that as the good breast.

[00:04:52]This is um psychoanalytic theory from Melanie Klene. If I am hungry and I cry and mother doesn't come and give me what I'm looking for, that's a bad mother and that's a bad breast. The thing, the object that frustrates me that doesn't feed my hunger is bad and that's a bad breast. And I think this is people's unconscious infantile set point now uh particularly younger people's when they're looking at life m crying problem problem verbalization of problem or signaling of problem resolution of problem from authority that's uh the mother here becomes the state I am politically homeless you have the left you have the right and then there's another axis which authoritarianism and statism and libertarianism. I would say I'm not a statist. I don't like statism.

[00:05:51]I don't like when people think the government should or can fix their problems. The government can't fix certainly can't fix this problem. So should we put systems in place to me felt infantile and entitled in a clinian way. There is a problem. I signal my problem.

[00:06:13]mother doesn't come this is bad breast I need a better mother to come and make the bad mother give me what I want good breast and what I would say is to younger people I am very compassionate to this perspective because I saw it being instilled in you in a way that it wasn't instilled in me now I was a 15 16 year old just 10 years before I would have 16 and 95 96 94 95 and so 10 years later I was working with young people and the difference was night and day. I wasn't told that I was going to be given anything. I wasn't told that and it was never not just told but implied that that things were going to be given to me because I cried about them. Everything that that I was told about was like, "It's going to be hard work. It's going to be difficult. You've got to make it happen." Why am I saying this? Because I think we can blame others. Uh there's people online. They'll blame men. That's infantile. That's me hungry. Want sex, want intimacy. Wow. Wow. Cry signal that I want it. The handsome man of my dreams doesn't come and pleasure me and give me the life I want. Wah wah. Bad breast, bad mother. It's infantile. We could blame women. I want sex. I want intimacy. Wah wah. The the woman of my dreams doesn't come. The Melanie Klein used to speak a lot about fantasy and she spelled it ph. So my ideal hasn't arrived. I'm furious.

[00:08:00]That's a narcissistic rage by the way.

[00:08:03]Now, if you go through that cycle, do you have narcissistic personality disorder? No. But if you're entitled social uh ideologically through your culture and then because you don't get what you want, you start getting very frustrated and tantruming. That is a narcissistic rage. That's not an it's not an appropriate response. Listen, and and it's not just young people who who fall prey to this because all of us who use social media and we're online, we all get inculcated into young people's culture. It just it just seeps in.

[00:08:36]There's not multiple internets segmented by age group. So, all the boundaries are blurring and we're all getting into this. Nobody owes anybody a friendship.

[00:08:47]Nobody owes anybody a relationship.

[00:08:49]You're not I hope that this isn't going to trigger anyone. You're not owed love, romantic love. You're not owed the romantic love of your fantasies and of your dreams. You're not owed anything at all. You can't stamp your feet and pout and cry and scream when you don't get the sex that you want, when you don't get the friendships that you want, when you don't get the job that you want, when you don't get the romance that you want. That's not an appropriate response.

[00:09:22]I first started thinking about this.

[00:09:24]There was a I won't say too much about it, but there was a very famous case, a true a crime case, and the the lawyer um used a strange term to describe the um the problem that her young client had. Now, the young client was objectively uh uh good-looking um but obviously had been a bit spoiled by his mom and was so frustrated that the girls that he liked in his high school didn't like him. They only liked the jocks in the high school that he shot them and killed them. a group of girls that had frustrated him, the bad breast, the object of my frustration.

[00:10:13]And uh the me the young men that these girls were interested in, not him, again, the object of his frustration, he shot them. And the lawyer said that he suffered from something called affluenza. He was so affluent that it had made him mentally ill. And that was to be part of the defense for the homicide. And I thought, what level of entitlement? Because I don't think he's an outlier. I think he's an outlier in the expression of extreme violence, but I don't think he's an outlier in the general attitude.

[00:10:48]I'm not getting exactly what I want, and I'm furious. Why should you get exactly what you want? What have you what work did you put in to get what you want? No, you give it to me. Okay. So, I've given you a couple of things to think about there. And I want to say really what I want people to fight against in themselves and fight against where they see it is the assumption that I or you as a passive consumer should be given exactly what we want when we want it and then our only job, our only work is to judge it. to rate it.

[00:11:33]Titty suckers. We're all turning into passive because a child is passive. I mean, there's nothing a child can do. It can't go and charm the mother. It can't do a little song and dance routine. The only thing it can do is cry and then when the breast comes, it it can do this and hold the breast and and suckle.

[00:11:51]That's it. That's literally all it can do.

[00:11:55]I claim that consumerism induces the same mindset in us and this makes the loneliness epidemic worse. Where are my friends? Why are they just not here?

[00:12:08]Where's my girlfriend? Where's my wife?

[00:12:10]Why is she just not here? What have I done to cause that to come into being?

[00:12:15]What does my lifestyle look like? What are my attitudes? What are my repeated patterns of behavior? I'll finish with this. I usually go to the gym and I'll I'll like listen to whatever music is going to keep me in a a a positive mental state that day and I have um noise cancelling headphones in. And then I go into like an altered state and I'm like bouncing around doing different movements and different exercises and stuff and having a a jolly old time and speaking to no one. I just don't talk to anybody. And in my own life, I've noticed how loneliness has really really had a negative impact. My social media usage is not great. Um, it's it's not just pacifying me, it's numbing me. And whilst it's pacifying and numbing me, it's entraining me into a view of reality that's not real.

[00:13:13]And I've really struggled. I mean, I work on my own. Um, and for various practical reasons that I won't talk about here, well, I'll talk about elsewhere. Um, if people really want to know, I've not been able to live anywhere for a few years. It's it's complicated. Involves visas with different countries and lawyers and all kinds of nonsense, but I've not been able to settle anywhere. And so, loneliness has been a real problem. So, what I've been doing is I've been saying, "Okay, when I go to the gym, for half the time I'm in the gym, I'm allowed to listen to my music. And the other half of the time that I'm in the gym, I take my earpods out and I talk to everybody who who makes eye contact with me briefly briefly because I'm losing this skill and I'm losing the ability to just chat with people." And I'll tell you this, if you want an antiviral that works uh very quickly for anxiety, for depression, for crushing feelings of loneliness, there's a medicine called talk to people. And if you take two droplets of it and you get good at it, you don't have to have long conversations. You don't have to have meaningful conversations about life and the universe. Just acknowledging that somebody else is there and having them acknowledge that you're there and having a brief pleasant interaction is enough.

[00:14:34]We did not evolve and survive as a species as atomized potent individuals.

[00:14:41]That is nonsense. Anybody who implies that or or suggests that to you is is is is um selling you a bill of goods.

[00:14:49]They're selling you [ __ ] It's [ __ ] We are here, humans are here today having this conversation now because of a huge amount of tribal based cooperation against staggering odds. If you look just in terms of mathematics and probability, we should be long dead, long extinct.

[00:15:13]But we're still here against every probability that we wouldn't be. And we're here through cooperation and contact and bonds and men not hating women and women not hating men and men and women playing nicely and being coming from a place of humility and humor and saying you are different to me. And at times that's going to be frustrating. That's going to be hard.

[00:15:39]But it's also what makes the relationship dynamic. It's also what adds the friction that builds sexual tension, that builds sexual desire, that causes culation, and that's where humans come from. And if we lose that, we're going to become extinct.

[00:15:58]We're going to become extinct having survived all that as a species, having survived all that and achieved everything that we have achieved up until this point because we built an environment and a culture that we're not a good evolutionary match for that pleasures us to death whilst atomizing us from everybody around us and reducing our contact which by the way doesn't just damage you psychologically. Did you know you need contact with other human beings to regulate your emotions? Not optional.

[00:16:33]Not optional. Need. You won't regulate your emotions in isolation. You can't.

[00:16:39]You can't. You're not evolved for it.

[00:16:41]You are a pack animal. You are a tribal creature. That's the primate you are.

[00:16:46]Sorry. That's the way it is. You won't fully regulate your emotions in isolation. Doesn't happen. We co-regulate in packs in tribes.

[00:16:59]Your hormones literally your hormones, your neurotransmitters require human contact to function and be regulated. It's nonoptional. We need each other. So, can we all take a step back and take a breath?

[00:17:19]When I talk about humility, the humility comes from awe.

[00:17:23]If you are 100% materialist, you believe in [ __ ] all. I don't believe in [ __ ] all. I'm just a meat sack. I was born at random. I'll die at random. I'm going to [ __ ] eat as much as I can and have as much [ __ ] sex and take all the drugs I can before I [ __ ] die.

[00:17:45]Well, bully for you. Please piss off and leave the rest of us alone. If you're a pure materialist and you believe in nothing and you think life is just about embibing as much pleasure as you can, you deserve to be depressed. You deserve to be anxious because that's an evil perspective.

[00:18:04]If you can't have awe for the incredible reality that is in front of us, the incredibly low probability reality that we're surrounded by, then you can't have you can't put aside your ego and your narcissism enough to have the humility to say this is amazing.

[00:18:25]The world is a wonder. The universe is a mystery wrapped inside of an unsolvable Zen Quan. And people are amazing.

[00:18:37]They're improbable.

[00:18:40]You ever look at a wasp? You look at the mechanics of a wasp. Pretty amazing. A human much more amazing than a wasp. Are people annoying? Yes, people are annoying. All are women annoying? Yes, women are annoying in womenish ways. Are men annoying? Yes, men are annoying in manish ways. But have you noticed the procedure here? Choose a group of people. Choose football fans, white football fans from the northwest of England, from Bolton, from Liverpool, from the whirl. Are they annoying? Yeah, they can be annoying. Are they annoying in an identifiable way? Yes, they can.

[00:19:15]Now go to Ghana and do the same thing.

[00:19:18]Now go to Tokyo and do the same thing.

[00:19:21]Now go to Koala Lumpa. Oh, have you noticed how Chinese women aged between 45 and 55 who are Malaysian Chinese who live in Koala Lumpa, do you notice how they all do this annoying thing? Yeah, human beings are annoying. Why are they annoying? Because they're frustrating and because sometimes we're unconscious and we're repetitive and, you know, just can be annoying. Just can be annoying. But do you see coming back to my earlier point how infantile a view that is? Should all people give me all pleasure all of the time? Am I a baby waiting for titty? I want milk.

[00:20:02]Okay, but it's not going to work like that. You're not going to get what you want 100% of the time. And yes, people are annoying. And yes, they're frustrating. And still, nobody should be being ignored to death.

[00:20:17]Nobody should be being ignored to [ __ ] death for God's sake.

[00:20:23]What can we do? We can build communities. A community that would be less annoying and more rewarding would be a community of like-minded people.

[00:20:34]It would be a community of people who maybe have had similar experiences and similar insights to you. But don't get elitist and don't get snotty. You know, I hear this from people sometimes, and I know that they think it sounds really edgy, but they just sound like a [ __ ] 16-year-old with a black fringe over one eye and painted nail varnish to me.

[00:20:52]They're like, "I don't do small talk."

[00:20:53]Oh, don't you don't you wise one? Oh my god. Please, Buddha, give me your high talk. Give me your highest conscious.

[00:21:02]Give me the wisdom of the Pades. Oh, w I don't do small talk. Don't you? Who the [ __ ] do you think you are? Talk.

[00:21:11]You get to have contact with another human being. You don't have to do every single effing thing for yourself. That old lady in the shop who's talking to you about the weather, that might be the one [ __ ] conversation she gets today.

[00:21:23]Talk to her. Oh, I don't do small talk.

[00:21:26][ __ ] off. [ __ ] off. What's small talk?

[00:21:29]It's people. You people are suffering.

[00:21:33]Everybody suffers. You suffer. I suffer.

[00:21:35]Everybody suffers. I don't do small talk. Ah, I want to talk philosophy. I want to talk philosophy. I want to talk psychology, but some people want to talk about football. So, [ __ ] them off. So, [ __ ] yeah. [ __ ] him. [ __ ] him. How easy is that? How easy is it to just dismiss people and be avoidant and throw people in the bin? That way, I don't have to do something I don't want to do for 15 minutes. Great. There's no small talk.

[00:22:03]There's just talk. We're all going to be dead one day.

[00:22:07]We're going to be dead for a time infinitely longer than we're alive.

[00:22:13]Show some respect, man. Show some humility. Show some awe. Show some reverence. Reverence for life. Reverence for nature. Reverence for people. Are they annoying? Yes, they're annoying.

[00:22:26]Still have reverence. Still have respect for what there is. Build communities.

[00:22:33]Reach out. Make a habit of talking to people. make a habit of making eye contact with people. [gasps] I don't know, maybe we could I can't I don't know, do like Meetup groups or something for for people who watch these videos or I don't know. Sounds like work. Sounds like hassle. Can't you guys just do it? Stop waiting for me to be the big breasted, big tittied mother that puts the tit in your mouth and do it yourselves.

[00:23:08]Damn, that was a disturbing image. Okay, folks. Compassion, love, war, kindness, humility. Still have your boundaries.

[00:23:18]There are bad people out there. That's their problem. It's not your problem.

[00:23:22]Keep them out of your life. But where you have the option to bond with people, do bond with people. We co-regulate together. Co-regulate together.

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